The meeting touched on the effect of the war in Ukraine and "botched Brussels sanctions" on skyrocketing energy prices, the PM's press chief said.Continue reading
Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó stated on Monday that the government wants Hungary to be a “local exception in a European continental crisis.”
He spoke at an event marking the ten-year anniversary and the opening of a new production facility of Diehl Aviation Hungary, saying that the country had come out from every recent crisis stronger than it had been before.
Hungary had to face a number of crises in the past 11 years, including financial, migratory, and health crises which “hit with elementary force and wore excessively on the global economy, including the European economy,” he said.
“The European economy is suffering and unfortunately, I must say that the worst is probably yet to come because the energy supply crisis looming on the horizon projects an extremely difficult vision of the future for Europe’s economy,” Szijjártó stated.
“We had earlier heard some western European politicians saying that they found a solution and Europe had separated itself from Russian gas, but the scares and rather chaotic measures of the recent period do not support such statements,” the minister added.
“Following the European responses to the Ukraine war, it is now the continent that had introduced the sanctions that suffers the most from the energy emergency and not the country against which they were introduced,” he noted.
The government wants to ensure that Hungary remains a local exception in a continental crisis and the country has all the necessary fundamentals considering that it has grown stronger from all the difficulties of the past period, Szijjártó emphasized.
According to the Foreign Minister: “the basis for all this has been an investment promotion economic policy which is built on keeping tax burdens the lowest in Hungary and providing support to prevent unemployment instead of introducing austerity.”
Hungary’s economic policy has proven crisis resistant as demonstrated by last year’s record figures in investment, employment, growth, and exports.
Szijjártó highlighted that Diehl had finished a third production facility in Hungary to manufacture aircraft parts. The company employs 870 people in Hungary and the state provided 867 million forints (EUR 2.2m) for the project, he added.
Over 3,300 people work in Hungary in aircraft and space vehicle production and the sector grew by 34 percent in the first five months of this year, generating a production value of over 70 billion forints, he said.
Szijjártó also underscored that German companies represented the largest investment community in Hungary, with bilateral trade reaching a record 60 billion euros last year, and the production volume increased by 7 percent in the first four months of this year.
Featured photo by Attila Balázs/MTI